Sugar Cubes

About 1 out of every 5 deaths in the US can be attributed to tobacco products.

$72 billion was spent on tobacco related products by consumers in the U.S. in 1999.

Every eight seconds, someone in the world dies due to tobacco.

Every day about 2000 youths become daily smokers.

Every year cigarettes leave about 31,000 kids fatherless.

Every day about 4,400 kids age 12 to 17 try a cigarette for the first time.

Of current smokers in the U.S., 46,000 have lung cancer from smoking.

In 1999, one year after agreeing to stop billboard advertising, tobacco companies increased advertising spending by 33 percentin magazines with more than 15 percent youth readership.

In 1990, 72 million bottles of a popular mineral water were voluntarily recalled because of small traces of benzene. The smoke from one pack of unfiltered cigarettes has as much benzene as 169 bottles of the contaminated water.

How do infants avoid secondhand smoke? “At some point they begin to crawl.” – Tobacco Executive 1996

In as little as 2 weeks nicotine changes the brains chemistry and addiction can begin.

In 2001, tobacco companies spent about $11 billion marketing their products. That’s about $1.5 billion more than the year before.

In 1990, a tobacco company put together a plan to stop Coroners from listing tobacco as a cause of death on a death certificate.

Cigarette smoke contains 69 chemical compounds that are known cause cancer.

There are about 12,711,000 current and former smokers in the U.S. with a tobacco related disease in the.

There are about 5,412,000 current smokers with a tobacco related disease in the U.S.

1 out of 3 smokers are estimated to eventually die from a tobacco-related disease.

Of current smokers in the U.S., 1,273,000 have emphysema from smoking.

Over 50,000 people a year die from secondhand smoke in the US alone.

Cigarette smoke contains the radioactive isotope Polonium-210.

In 1989, millions of cases of imported fruit were banned after a small amount of cyanide was found in just two grapes. There’s thirty-three times morecyanide in a single cigarette than was found in those two grapes.

An internal tobacco company marketing report from 1989 said quote “We believe that most of the strong, positive images for cigarettes and smoking are created by cinema and television.”

In the mid 90’s, a major tobacco company planned on boosting sales of their cigarettes by targeting a new consumer market: gays and homeless people. They called their plan Project Sub-Culture Urban Marketing. Also known as Project SCUM.

Cigarettes will eventually kill a third of the people who use them.

Tobacco signage is often placed at a child’s eye level.

One tobacco company developed a genetically altered tobacco with twice the addictive nicotine of regular tobacco. They code-named it “Y-1.”

In 1984, one tobacco company referred to new customers as “replacement smokers.”

Over 80 percent of all adult smokers started smoking before they turned 18.

Tobacco companies make $1.8 billion from under age sales.

Pee contains urea. Some tobacco companies add urea to cigarettes.

Tobacco companies make a product that kills 440,000 Americans a year.

Tobacco companies make a product that kills 1,200 Americans a day.

2,000 teens start smoking everyday.

Tobacco companies make a product that kills about 50Americans each hour.

In the 1970s, tobacco companies started making light cigarettes by putting tiny holes in the filters to let extra air mix with the smoke. They found they could get low readings of toxic agents from FTC-type cigarette testing machines.

In 1980, a tobacco company considered looking at itself as a “drug company.”

Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

Every 8 seconds, someone in the world dies from tobacco.

Since 1964 there have been 12 million tobacco related deaths in the U.S.

Smoking during pregnancy results in the deaths of about 1000 infants each year in the U.S.

70 percent of smokers want to quit. Only about 5 percent actually succeed every year.

The impact of nicotine is jacked up because tobacco companies add ammonia.

In the 1980s, tobacco companies started working on making fire-safe cigarettes. Ones that would be less likely to ignite furniture or clothing and cause fires. As of 2002, only one of the hundreds of U.S. cigarette brands uses fire safe technology, and cigarettes are still the number one cause of fire-related deaths.

Every year, 95 percent of people who try to stop smoking are not successful.

In the US, smoking causes about 445 new cases of lung cancer every day.

Tobacco kills more Americans than AIDS, drugs, homicides, fires, and auto accidents combined.

Cigarette smoke contains benzene, carbon monoxide, arsenic, hydrogen cyanid

Seek the Truth

Tags: The truth, Smoking, Tobacco

Marla asks Jack about the kiss on his hand, who did this to you? guy or a girl?
Tyler from downstairs whisper: this conversation, Jack repeats: this conversation. Tyler: is over. Jack repeats: is over, and he slams the door shut…

Tags: Fight Club

NOUAKCHOTT — Mariem Sow was a little girl when her sister Zeinabou choked to death in front of her while being force-fed camel’s milk by a family slave.

Beaten if she refused to swallow the rich diet of sweetened milk and millet porridge, Zeinabou was one of many Mauritanian girls fattened up because of an ancient belief that corpulent women make more desirable wives.

“As soon as my older sister was 12 they started force-feeding her so she would be plump by 15. They wanted to prepare her for marriage,” said Mariem, now 42, wrapped in white robes and reclining on cushions in her Nouakchott home.

The traditions of the desert are very much alive in Mauritania, an Islamic republic on the western edge of the Sahara whose people were still almost entirely nomadic when the country gained independence from France in 1960.

Wealthier families who have settled in the capital Nouakchott often keep a “khaima” — a nomadic tent — in the courtyard of their homes. Men and women walk the sandswept streets in flowing robes and headscarves.

Having a voluptuous wife and daughters — well fed to survive the rigours of a desert lifestyle — was long a visible sign of wealth and power among the country’s light-skinned Moors. It is still seen by many as a canon of beauty.

But with Lebanese satellite television broadcasting images of flat-stomached girls cavorting on beaches, and more Mauritanians travelling abroad, the vogue is starting to change.

Many Mauritanians believe it is unseemly for women to be seen engaging in any strenuous activity, but as dusk falls, chubby ladies shuffle self-consciously around the stadium in Nouakchott, their tracksuit trousers hidden under flowing “malhafa” robes.

“Sometimes I walk, sometimes I run. We come after dusk when the men have gone home,” said Fatimatou, a breathless 31-year-old, force-fed as a child but now trying to get down to 60 kg (132 lb). “It’s no longer the modern fashion to be overweight. Women have evolved. Now they work in offices and they have to be fit.”

Big is beautiful

More than one in five women in Mauritania, which straddles black and Arab Africa, were force-fed as young girls, according to a government survey from 2001, the latest available.

“Our society has this vision that a woman has to be fat to be beautiful. It is a canon of beauty,” said Marienne Baba Sy, head of a government commission that deals with women’s issues.

“If you’re a thin woman, people assume your family don’t look after you,” she told Reuters.

The force-feeding technique known as “gavage” — a French word more closely associated with fattening up geese to produce foie gras — is less widely practised than it used to be after the government launched campaigns to highlight the health risks.

But the cult of fatness has deep roots.

“My husband says he wants me to lose weight but he looks at fat women and I think he prefers going to bed with them,” said Nene Drame, 47, a writer working on a novel about force-feeding.

“The Mauritanian man is savage by nature. He likes something he can get his hands on,” she said.

“Gavage” left some women struggling to walk, not just because of their weight — which often tops 90kg — but because they were tortured as they were force-fed.

Some had their fingers or toes broken so the pain would distract them from having to swallow the milk and porridge.

Others had their feet crushed by a “zayar” — a wooden vice which would only be loosened once they ate.

“Above all it causes cardiac problems, problems during childbirth. Even from the point of view of work, obese women are less productive,” said Baba Sy.

“They get tired very quickly, out of breath. Psychologically it is very damaging. You can’t do the same things as other women — you can’t even pray properly,” she added.

Some children were tied down while being fed and were forced to eat whatever they vomited up during the ordeal, Baba Sy said.

The force-feeding often lasted years.

Horse pills

The 2001 survey estimated around 10 percent of women aged 15-19 were force-fed as young girls, down from 35 per cent among 45-54 year-olds.

Although brutal “gavage” may be on the decline, the pressure to conform to traditional notions of beauty has given rise to a new phenomenon in which girls take pills to stimulate their appetite or animal steroids to boost their girth.

Packets of large pink pills made in Pakistan and marked “not for human consumption” are laid out on upturned boxes under trees on the edge of one of Nouakchott’s main markets.

“Normally they’re just for animals but we sell them to women too. We sell them for 50 ouguiya (20 US cents) to people who buy for their animals,” said one seller, declining to be named.

“But for women we sell them for 200 ouguiya a tablet. They buy three or four at a time,” he said, just before a young teenage couple walked up to make a purchase.

Shocked by the death of her sister, Mariem Sow has stayed slim and was even asked to apply for a modelling contract when she went to Paris after marrying a French man.

Via Jordan Times

Count your blessings girls! :@

Tags: Mauritania